


The Survivor

by Ashanimus



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ancestor-Era, Ancestors, Blood, Gen, Mild Gore, Rainbow Drinkers, Zombies, chainsaws, horror movie idiocy, scary abandoned buildings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-31
Updated: 2013-11-25
Packaged: 2017-12-31 01:27:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1025679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashanimus/pseuds/Ashanimus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She opens her jaw and leans towards you like a shark, without thinking you jerk your head forward in a desperate headbutt. Last ditch, pathetic, all you have are the muscles in your neck. The angle was wrong. A sharp flower of pain blooms in your forehead and circuits behind your eyes up to the root of your damaged horn—and she doesn’t even let go. </p><p>By the time you’ve blinked your eyes open her breath is harsh in her throat, and she’s fisted her claws in your hair.</p><p>“I don’t want to hurt you,” she rasps.</p><p>“You’re going to kill me.” Your voice is tight, shaking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Part 1**

You can’t remember when you wake up, so you know it’s not a vision. As if you were a wriggler again you’re almost afraid to open your eyes, like whatever set your blood pusher galloping as though it could escape your rib cage would be staring you in the occulars when you did. You will yourself back into your body and out of that dream place. Your matesprit’s flesh is warm against your back, her heartbeat reassuring against yours. Your family’s breath hisses, in, out, in out. 

Screaming ghosts of things dead or dying flash behind your eyelids when you blink. You creak upright, and rub the last of the dream from your eyes. 

Poison light pushes red against the black suncloth they hung around the window slits. The air is warm, thick—uncomfortably so for your matesprit if the dewy sweat between her shoulder blades and the blanket you share wadded up by her calves is anything to go by.

This place is heavy, with silence thickened by the heat of the angry sun outside. 

Stillness you can appreciate. Stillness is ambient life: wind full of sand, sighing rivers, skittering animal feet, heartbeats. Silence is empty of everything except fear, dead and hot and tight like a string a breath away from snapping.

Its the silence that freezes movement, stifles breath. 

Your pan itches, a half-remembered song humming in the back of your mind. Your mind buzzes, electric, and even though your limbs are heavy with sleep the idea of lying back down is almost nauseating. 

You slide out of your bedroll and take your sickle. 

**  
You don’t walk too far. There are two excellent reasons for this. One, that would be fucking stupid in the case of an incident, which with your track record of Life in General is exceedingly high. In many ways mortal risk has always been integral to the fabric of your existence. It becomes easy to take it for granted. Two, in the event that someone in your family wakes up and can’t find you, that someone is going to chew your ass off. 

To be fair, you’re liable to react the same way. 

Lucky for you, there’s a room big enough to accommodate your needs about a minute’s walk down the corridor. 

You pause. The corridor was suffocating and smelled like bone dust, but at the very least it was dark. 

You push the door open. Grim light stabs through the tatty holes in the suncloth curtains, dappling the corners of the room shrinks your pupils and floods details. You think you can make out the remains of a skeleton sprawled in the far left. Your mind leaps—wants to place fang scrapes on the skull, confirm the most likely cause of his or her demise even though the telltale stench of charred, rotted flesh is absent from the thick air. 

Or mostly absent. But it would be, of course. This place is a hulked out relic of the Revenant Wars, lying broken and blackened against the foothills of an officially unnamed broken jaw of a mountain range. Nothing organic except that which has been carefully preserved in tiny pockets of dark over the sweeps remains—even the suncloth curtains have been placed here by other wandering vagabonds looking for a respite in the middle of fucking revenant country.

And yet, something tickles at your nose. Coppery, tacky. Blood, coagulating. The hair on the back of your neck stiffens, and your palms, already slick from the heat bead again with new sweat.

The ground growls and rumbles, like some behemoth stirring in its sleep. You don’t fall, but you falter.

God. Dammit.  
You grit your teeth and tighten your grip on the sickle. There’s been a lot of tectonic activity lately, its nothing to worry about. It probably didn’t even wake your family. You know there is nothing here except the ghosts, but you can’t hear them right now. Only the voices of the long dead are here, Mituna had said before you had made this place the destination. The only presently doomed people in the vicinity are you. 

You step inside. Despite thick light, fluttering curtains, the dead eyes of the skull in the corner, you breathe deep through the nose, and will yourself still. You shift, settling into first position.

You raise your arms, and begin to dance. 

The sickle rings through the stagnant air like a bell toll, sharp and unwelcome. The silence seems to flinch. It presses down against your back, burrowing into your aural holes as if to dig down and reach your blood pusher with its suffocating claws. 

Ring, ring. Second, third. You are beating it back with the song of steel and breath. Third, fourth. Its hot. Hot even for you with boiling blood. You can’t see well. But you don’t need dark to see, never needed dark to see. Your tempo increases, your feet tapping out a fevered tattoo over the gloomy stone floor. Your world has narrowed to the dance—your weapon and your heart beat against the glare and silence. 

A flicker of movement, by the window curtain. A stutter, in the light catches your eye and you hear it.

A violent gust of wind, full of sand and powdered glass tears the curtain on the west wall away, briefly flooding the room with the sun’s acid glare. 

Your body saves you before your mind realizes what happened and dives for the corner. You squint, pressed up against the same corner as the skeleton, its ribs poking uncomfortably into yours as the curtain flaps like the wings of a carrionbeast before sighing against the window pane once more. 

Silence descends. You’re shaking and sweating now, and you’re an idiot. You’ve already spite the sun when you were a wiggler and have the big fucking scar to prove it. You should know better than to be giving it a fucking second chance. 

You drop your gaze to fumble for your fallen sickle, and then your acid sack turns to water. 

There is blood on the ground, and its still gummy underneath your hand. The trail slithers along the side of the wall, and you’re just now noticing the handprints flaking off the stone, now that you’re close enough to see despite the glare. The trail disappears into a small doorway leading into the next room. 

Despite yourself, you clip your sickle back to your belt and crawl along the floor, studying the marks. The wounded person was somewhere in the green you think, The height of the handprints on the wall, taking into account that this amount of blood probably meant multiple wounds and maybe a stomach injury suggested somewhere in the bluer greens, possibly teal. You’re relieved to note that the color is consistent. If the person had been attacked by a revenant, the blood would have started to turn black and thicken as the trail went on as they changed and that would have been your cue to wake your family and hightail it the fuck out of this place. 

“Everyone there is dead,” Captor had said. “So we’ll be as safe as we’ve ever been. So mortal danger. But it’s the usual mortal danger.”

This gives you pause, and for the third time today your find your mind wandering back, trying to picture what it would have been like to die getting your brains chewed out. Your gut tightens. You would have had to watch your friends and quadrants lose hope like blood from a wound, and finally die screaming with your hand in theirs and a weapon in the other. Some probably met their fate fighting, others cowering and crying.  
And then you imagine dying alone, two days ago—if you’re right about this blood trail.  
You’re not sure which of those is worse. 

If you were a sentimental idiot, your instincts would be to pay your respects. If you were an opportunistic asshole, you would consider that they might have gear that might be useful to you and your family, and they aren’t going to be needing it anymore.

Luckily, you are both. 

You peer into the room. The darkness should have been a relief, but you can’t a damn thing. Well, most damn things anyway. You can make out what looks like a slumped silhouette at the back of the room.

You can’t smell the body. There’s the tang of blood, old blood. But there’s something thinner about the air here. Something is sparkling on the ground—like someone had spilled sugar. 

You take a step. Immediately the room is a faction cooler than the room behind you. But it’s smaller, and the stone beneath your feet is so crooked and uneven you have to drop back into crouch to avoid rolling your fucking ankle. 

You set your jaw. Buckled floor. That means structural damage. That was something you could tell from the outside before you had decided to stay here. But damage this high up and inside the stupid place implied some kind of bomb had gone off. Inside the structure. Whatever, it hadn’t fallen down under its own weight yet, and if it could take that body it could probably take you.

Even so you get light, shifting your weight into your upper body as you creep forward. You may or may not be holding your breath. 

The wind blows again—or at least, that’s what you guess, since the room fuzzes out on you again. Details blur, darkness grays—you can’t really make out the body more than just a twisted lump of fabric and you’re pretty sure those are horns, crook shape…

You force yourself to fill your lungs. You straighten up, fist your hands in the stiff fabric, and pull. 

Its a bunch of smashed up chairs and a warped frame. It isn’t until you catch a glimpse of a three bright red eyes glaring at you up from the fucking floor that you realize that it must have contained a mirror. You’d mistaken what appears to be a smashed up lantern for a head. The sparkling stuff appears to be the broken glass from the pane and mirror bits.  
Your hands are shaking, and this is ridiculous. There’s nothing here. You wipe your hands, and take a step. 

An icy draft hisses through the room. Your whole body flinches as if burned. Your mouth dries faster than a drop of spit on parched desert sand. Why is the air cold. Its hotter than hell’s barbeque in here. And yet its cold, and the stones moan beneath your feet.  
You drop the cloth, stumble to the side.

Things seem to happen slowly, like you’re suddenly immersed in mud. You can feel your balance failing. Your muscle memory automatically corrects for a fall, you brace and relax for impact on the stone floor.

There’s no floor.  
Or rather, there’s a fucking hole. You fling your hand out, manage to jam your claws painfully into the lip of the hole but your grip is tenuous and you can’t breathe. Your sickle comes loose from your belt, and your hear it clatter down—down—

The lip crumbles, and you fall.

**

You are now Porrim Maryam, and you are standing over your clade. Clade might be a strong word. Misleading even. But known, sensible words had long since lost their power to describe what you have in a young troll, then two, then three; suddenly adults and sleeping with their bellies up, throats bared in your presence. So you settled for the heresy in the word ‘mother’. In a way, they have become are yours, and you are theirs. They share each other’s breath, warmth. Liquid heartbeats fill your ears, and for a moment you imagine you can see the blood sluicing through the thin veins of Mituna Captor—Psiioniic’s—outstretched neck. Your skin tingles. 

 

Still, no one is looking, no one is awake. You wet your lips. The worst is when your tongue remembers, or constructs the memory of the taste. You haven’t tasted Mituna Captor’s sparking yellow blood yet; even though mere nights after he joined you he offered you his wrist. You declined, out of politeness. Even though your guts are sandbags hanging off your skeleton, you know you have at least two nights you can comfortably go without feeding. You would hunt, but you’ve been a wanderer and a survivor too long not to know that out on the wasted flats of revenant country you would not find anything bigger than moths or thumb-sized rock lizards for at least a whole night’s worth of walking. 

But never a wanderer without purpose. 

You brush your fingers over Kankri’s half of the bedroll he shares with Meulin. Its not quite cold, but his blood warmth has leeched away. His sickle is gone too, so you know what he’s doing and where, presumably that big armory down the hall. You are not worried. But there is, and always will be a piece of your gut that whispers, “But what if,” and soothes, “I will make sure he is okay.”

You did not raise a fool and most days you are confident in what you helped grow. But you did raise a strange heart, full of alien softness and compassion. That has thus far proved to be just as dangerous. But you are older and you know better now, and so does he.

Most of the time. 

You set out the utensils and unpack everyone’s breakfast for him. The dried fish and salted musclebeast curd will give them strength to get out of here and find proper hunting later this evening. It will sit leaden in your stomach, so split yours between Meulin’s and Captor’s. One of them will have to open a vein for you soon, after all. Kankri will be irritated, but it is an irritation he has lived with. The thought of closing your fangs around any part of him hard enough to break skin has always filled you with an aching confusion and strange revulsion—the kind that makes you think of opposed magnets. The thought of his blood, bright and damningly red and hot on your tongue makes you feel dizzy. It is inane, it is impractical, and it is frankly the kind of thing that as an outsider looking in would scoff at. You would. 

You can never name it, and you never will. 

You have spent most of your life now doing your best to keep Kankri’s blood inside his body. Any who would attempt the opposite will find themselves at the business end of a revving chainsaw with only three words.

Make them pay.

You pull one of Meulin’s torn dresses and your needle. You are not yet worried. But you will give him an hour.

 

**

 

It probably only took you about ten seconds total. 

You know how to fall well enough. You would like to say you know how to get up better, but that is pithy garbage when you’re plummeting who knows how fucking far and all you can hope to do is scrabble at the walls and try to hit ledges. 

You do. Many ledges. You stop trying to count after three and force yourself to remember how to hit the ground without shattering every bone in your body. It does not help that you’ve only done this once, and even then Meulin had to half-drag you away from that messy failure. You can almost hear Renabe scolding you again. 

You can almost feel the ground rushing to meet you. Your relax your knees, shove out your breath and strike the ground You try not to feel the impact rattle your bones, rather imagine it flowing through your body as you roll the intertia away. You feel like a skipped stone, rolling messily to a halt only when what feels like a low wall stops you. You feel like once huge bruise and your knees hurt like all fuck but nothing seems broken. 

You are flat on your back in the underbelly of the garrison, staring up at the hole where you fell. You can’t really tell how far it is, the details are lost to light. There is nothing but the shade provided by the wounded structure balanced precariously over your head and the columns and half-walls supporting it. The sunlight outside has turned the world beyond the pillars and acid white, the white of death and the best you can do is shapes and patches of shade in the dark ahead, cast by huge, jagged shelves of stone and brick jutting out of the ground like the bones of the planet itself were broken.

The ground shakes again, insistently. From above, chunks of stone and masonry clatter down in a stony rain, and you realize, belatedly, that these huge slabs of debris have to be from the structure precariously straddled over you, with more and more of it falling down in massive slabs to form a bizzare sort of graveyard down here. Its left thin patches of shadow and a million blind corners—perfect for fucking up whatever remains of your day vision and providing a excellent hiding places for revenants and who the hell knows what else. 

You sit up. Your head reels and the contents of your stomach leap as if to slither out of your belly. You fight the urge to heave, trying to regain your bearings. Your head is bleeding, you think. Something hot trickles down from your temple, beading uncomfortably at your jaw. Shit.

There is something dark in the patchy earth beside you. 

Of course, you realize numbly. The poor wounded bastard you’d been trailing had fallen down the hole, just like you. The blood spatter was big—it would have been a puddle. This is where the body should lie, and yet…you crawl forward, squint. Impossibly, ridiculously, this person had gotten up, and staggered forward. Surely to die? This close, you can tell that the blood certainly belonged to someone in the green, someone very close to your mother’s own shade—

You try to roll to your feet, but your cloak snags. No, like its wedged between rocks, it almost feels like tugging. Fuck, as it that’s all you need. Travel and flight have taken inches off of this thing already, and the thought of losing brings a low growl from your throat. You turn to yank it from whatever’s trapped it. 

All your survival instincts turn to instant shit and howl of terror manages to escape before your clamp a hand over your traitor mouth. A revenant. Half a revenant even, a revenant torso is jammed beneath several heavy stones. Whatever was left of its vocal cords had long since rotted away, the damn thing was nearly all skeleton by now, its bony claws sunk deep into the edges of your cloak, its on remaining, rotten eye rolling in its abyssal eye sockets. It makes a dragging motion, as if to pull you closer and holyshit you are barely a fucking foot away from that snapping mouth. With a barely contained cry of disgust you bring your sickle down on the edge of the cloak and scrabble away. You clutch your chest. Your eyes are uselessly darting about in the brightness—no, no, no. 

You have other senses, use them. If there are other revenants around they’ll all come running because you couldn’t manage to contain your girlish screech, but for the time being, you have to kill that thing. You were lucky. You escaped a fate worse than death on a moth’s wing and a half-assed prayer. The idea of your family finding this thing by way of a nasty accident makes your guts churn again. You use debris to pin the revenant’s hands and a few rocks to smash its jaw because you were too stupid to wear your greaves when you left the room.

When it’s over you crouch to examine the blood again. You are struggling with the idea that someone with a wound this severe managed to apparently survive the blow and the fall. Where was the body? They are almost certainly dead now. But you don’t feel alone.

The fact that you are probably surrounded by dribbling revenants, wounded and that your world glows with deadly sunlight probably has something to do with that. Maybe they got dragged off.

You heft your sickle again. The handle feels slick, as your palms bead with sweat. 

You edge forward and step into the shadow. 

A swampy hiss rattles the air.  
“Get out.”  
Something flies in your direction. You whip to the side was barely makes a sound when it strikes the ground. You glance at it. Your eyes might be fooling you, but it looks like a loaf of stale grubloaf.

“I had thought all my pursuers dead.” 

You squint. The enclave isn’t perfect shadow—far from it. A shaft of light has pours into it from the back, and within it you, can just make out the shape of a kneeling woman. Her vocal nodes seemed to rasp to produce her voice—a rusted, broken sound. She hissed again, threw her head back to display her backwards sweeping horns, but she does not attack. Indeed, she doesn’t move to do so, not even when you dare to take a step closer. She flinches, and you realize that she must not be able to see you well, taking you by your silhouette and the sickle in your hand for a Threscutioner.

She’s sitting in a pillar of light, that’s got to be fucking her day vision.

Desolation clings to her like a second skin. You can tell by the set of her shoulders—the expectation of pain that she will go down screaming and clawing in futility. It’s a skin that cries out for some kind of touch—lethal or kind, anything to kill the tension of waiting for one or the other with the grim certainty of one and the moth wing prayer for the other.

“You are a fugitive?” your voice is quiet. It is not a question, and she looks up. You move slowly, hoping your silhouette is tracking for her, and put your sickle down on the ground next to you. “Then you are in good company. Will you come out?” Your eyes are refusing to adjust, but you can just scent the fear pheromones buried underneath the stench of sand, old wounds and death. Just barely. 

Either way she doesn’t move. 

You approach her carefully, casually rolling over your survival instincts. This is something you are practiced at. She is hunched over, but its not the crouch of someone in agonizing pain from injury. She is kneeling, arms folded over her belly, as if plagued by hunger pains. You crouch down, and wrap your arms around her shoulders. Or as much of them as you can manage for a comforting embrace. She is almost twice as broad as you and at least a third again as tall.

She reeks of old blood and the salt tang of tears. Her skin is gummy with accumulated grime and sweat and she is oddly cold to the touch. Usually when you find people like this—to many for your own comfort, they rarely reciprocate the physical contact.

She surprises you by gripping your hand with a startling strength.

“Why?” her voice is dry rasp, half a sob. 

 

“In my experience, its better to be a fugitive with another rather than alone.” 

There is a pause like a taut string. She is waiting for you to ask what she’s done. You won’t, because the only thing that matters is a mysterious injured person whom you may be able to help. You can’t find a heartbeat. Oh—there is goes, deep and desperate, one beat. Then, quiet again. You wait several seconds. Too long. 

Bad-ump. 

You still your palm against her back. She is cold, cold even for a mid blood. You would expect her wound to have made her feverish or sick, and this strange heartbeat is something unlike you’ve ever treated before, or encounter with your mother. You frankly don’t have the opportunity to treat those this high on the hemospectrum often, or at least not often enough to remember quirks of their typical physiology. You would like to look at her wound, and see if there is anything you can do. With your current supply tally of nothing you’re not sure what you could, but you would at least know what you were dealing with before trying to move the both of you out of this infested wreck and back up to your family. 

You begin with the basics.

“So what is your--?”  
“Pemalu Timido.” Her voice is a flat, small sigh.  
You are silent. You were not expecting a hatchname. After some brief deliberation, you reply. Both of your names are problematic, but in this context your title is distracting and would turn the conversation towards you, which is the opposite of what you want. You tell her your name.  
“Kankri Vantas.” She repeats it slowly, as if tasting it. “You are remarkably forward in a pale fashion after strangers.”

“I strongly object to the notion that holding a wounded person in a manner meant to comfort should be ruled exclusively romantic,” you say almost automatically. You were mistaken for a pale prostitute at seven sweeps, after that it loses its shock value. 

“That is an odd notion,” she finally sighs. She does not pull away. 

“It is,” you concede, “But society and I have never exactly seen eye to eye. Speaking of seeing.” You relax your hold on her, crouch a little in front of her. You make sure not to let go of her hand. “If you let me look at your wound, I might be able to help you.” The ground rumbles beneath you. Showers of pebbles cascade down from the ceiling, stumbling over the holes in the wall. The darkness it offers for fluttering heartbeats taunt your sore eyes. You wish she’d come out of the light, and you briefly wonder if her encounter with whoever wounded her scarred her face. 

She shakes her head. 

She curls in on herself once again, squeezing your hand as if in pain. She runs her thumb over the beads wrapped around your knuckles. 

“Are these for your quadrants?” 

“My clade is here with me,” you reply, not really wanting to dive into that conversation at the moment. “They are probably looking for me right now. They’ll be able to help us out, come on. Can you stand?” 

“You’re like a little furnace,” she whispers. The earth rattles again. Your unstable squat fails and you bank your knees sharply on the stone. You might have fallen over entirely if she hadn’t been holding your hand with a ferocity that has taken you aback once before but now it’s unsettling.  
“I didn’t know lowbloods ran so warm.” She pulls you against her chest. You let her. You are very interested in her heartbeat.

“I didn’t know jade ran so cold,” you mutter in reply, “Although I’m willing to bet money I don’t actually have to say that you need medical attention before your wound contracts some kind of rot.” 

“I should be dead.”

As if that hasn’t already crossed your mind about five fucking times already. 

“And yet you’re not,” you say trying to keep your voice soothing. “Can—“

“You smell nice.”  
You blink. Also, you are pretty sure you smell like fear-sweat, blood, and two days travel. Something inside you goes cold as something half-remembered wakes.

You have just enough time to curse yourself for the stupidest person alive when the ground decides it is so embarrassed of you the whole planet is shaking its head in shock and sadness.

Its like the rug was stolen from beneath your feet and both of you lurch to the side. Rocks easily the size of your head hail around you both. Instinctively you cover the back of your neck and curl up as debris rains down—holy shit if that crack is any indication at aleast some of these fucking rocks are the size of your fat head—

A thunderous boom rattles your bones, something enormous slams into place barely a body length away from you think—and then something sharp and heavy strikes your horn and everything goes white. 

Your eyes flutter open. You are pretty sure you are staring at what was one your entrance into this enclave. Except now you are staring at a huge ass slab of stone, buried deep into the sandy ground. 

You lurch unsteadily to your feet and press your hands up against the stone, and flinch when you hear the shift of fabric as Pemalu Timido shifts upright again. The quake dislodged her from her sunspot, and now you know why she was there in the first place

She wraps her hands, glowing with hideous light around her belly, and looks up at you with eyes that are bright with something feverish.

“I’m so hungry,” she rasps. 

 

**  
You are Porrim Maryam, and you are on your knees with tacky jade blood between your fingers that isn’t yours, cursing yourself. You have not forgotten your hunger. If anything you are more aware of it than ever, tugging and tearing at your insides, reminding you that you are dry and hollow. Except the hollow is burning away and filling up with something else.

You take out your lipstick.

**

When you were young, it never occurred to you to ask your mother about it. You had your food, and she had hers. You rarely saw her skin light up, and even when you did it was familiar, frightening in the context for whoever was threatening the both of you. 

You eyes were close to turning before you asked her what the change had been like. You’d lacked the courage at six sweeps simply to ask. This is a disquieting thing to you as an adult, but Porrim has always seems unchanging to you, constant as the set and rise of the moon itself or the blood in your veins.

She had pursed her lips then. “Ravenous,” she’d said finally. “It hurt. I would have hurt anyone or anything to make it stop.”

“But not me,” you had said, leaning against her chest.  
She’d wrapped her arms around you, and ran her claws lightly through your hair.

“Not you.” 

“Kankri Vantas.”

You can feel sweat prickling at your temples. She sounds like she ate a cheese grater, and you can her shuffle closer to you. Her presence at your back is heavy, and you are suddenly aware of how small you are. 

You turn around, slowly. As if sudden movement are going to do anything, she’s not an animal. And yet . 

The light of her skin flickers, startling, muzzy white. Her eyes are luminous fevered and her breath is swampy and harsh. 

“Its cold. Will you hold me again?”


	2. Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When you chose him—so long ago and yet even looking at him now you remember the way that grub wriggled in your arms, the curve of his thimble horns, the high silk feather of his squeaks and suddenly you ache—you learned that what you have for him is like a cut mineral. Multifaceted, forged in fire. Something that to fully see even once needs to be held, picked up, and examined from many sides.
> 
> But it can also, sometimes, like now be hard. Hard, cold and sharp.

**Part 2**

She’s running her tongue over her primary fangs, but in that distracted way that kids do when their eyes turn and their teeth sharpen. Except this is a grown ass woman, and her voice is thin and desperate.

She probably hasn’t figured out what’s happened. 

For a moment, you’re at war. You consider telling her, but then it will confirm verbally what her body is already demanding. Wounds hurt more after you look at them.

“I’m going to help you,” you say carefully. “What we need to do now is wait a little while longer, just a little while.” Your voice is soft. More than anything you just want to open a vein for her immediately, but even at the height of your rot-panned impulsivity you know that’s a terrible idea. You resolve that when you get out of here you will—with your family nearby. In her state right now she might accidentally drain you dry without that extra protection, and they could pry her off your wrist without hurting her.

Maybe you have a chance at stalling her a different way first…and despite everything, you want to know.

“Pemalu Timido—you gave me your hatchname. What’s your title?” you ask her. 

She takes another step towards you—barely three feet from you now, and pauses. You blink, her glow is washing out your vision at the edges, and you can’t see past her. Where’s your sickle?

Fuck. As if you could do anything with it right now.

“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t describe me now.” She chuckles and you wince. “If I get out of here alive they should call me ‘the Defeated’ or the ‘Banished.’”

“No,” you blurt. Something in you flares, even as you scoot along the wall to open up more space between the two of you. “Don’t fucking do that.”

She tilts her head like a confused bird, even as she follows your movement with the eyes of a hungry howlbeast. 

“Do what?” her voice has that flat, defeated quality again. You meet her eyes. 

“Never define yourself by something that happened to you. You’ll make yourself a victim in your own mind, and never progress beyond it—and then no one will see you anymore, just the thing that happened.”

“What if the thing that happened is more powerful than what remains?”

A bead of sweat trickles down your temple, setting fire to the cut on your jaw. 

“I know someone a lot like you. I can promise you that’s not the case.”

“Like me?” her voice is a harsh, hollow sob. “I need—”

She flexes her claws. Her eyes dart to your neck and fix back on your eyes. She staggers forward. “—your help.”

The inside of your mouth is dry as musclebeast fodder. You swallow, and immediately regret it when you notice her eyes following the movement of your throat. 

“You’re stronger than this.” Your voice is sticky, cowed by the thunder of your pulse. “I know you probably don’t feel very strong right now—“

“I could,” she lurches at you again and you flinch. “I could feel strong.” 

You jerk to scramble away, but something tangles up in your feet with a sharp clang. Before you fall, she seizes you by the collar of your cloak and drags you upright against the wall. 

The sickly light from her skin fills your vision and drowns the darkness in gray, but she is close enough to your face that you can see her pupils are blown out black and huge. 

She fists her claws in your cloak and makes as though to draw you in. You stiffen, and hold out your hands like a shield.

“Stop—“ a metallic ring truncates your words. 

Both of you look down. Her foot had knocked into your sickle. Which had been lying. At your fucking feet. This whole. Fucking. Time. 

Her expression doesn’t change as she kicks it away. 

“It can’t be easy. I will help you, but you have to wait until my clade gets here. Just a few fucking minutes.” 

You mean it. If you could solve the problem by opening a vein for her here and now you’d do it. But she’s starving to death and you remember your custodian falling upon that threshcutioner still shuddering with the echo of life.

You asked her if she remembered, but she did not answer you. 

“I’ve waited three days.”

“I know—“ she reaches for you. Without thinking you snatch her wrists. Her skin is practically vibrating with that desperate strength, she pauses only for a moment to humor you.

“Are you afraid of me?” she sounds wounded, but her eyes are freaking you the fuck out, they aren’t focused. She’s looking past through, through your skin. “I won’t hurt you.” She breaks your grip as if your fingers were made out of overcooked noodles and gathers you up into an embrace. You flail, you want her off you right this fucking instant, but she might as well be made of cold, bright steel. “See?” 

You’re speaking quickly now—too quickly. “You need to listen to me, if you do this now—“

“You’ve been kind,” she says, pushing you into the wall, hard enough that your cracked horn jabs into the stone, short circuiting whatever you were going to say. She pulls lightly at the collar of your cloak. “I’ll leave some for you.”

“Don’t!”

You are out of time, and out of options. You are an idiot and have literally no one to blame but yourself for this, and now you are fucking terrified. Your acid sack plummets and your mind travels back to Meulin sleeping beside you when you got up—Mituna slumped against the wall, your mother. Without them there is a part of you know that feels terribly small and naked.

They will find you eventually. You break out into an icy sweat—they’ll find—

“Please,” you say quietly. “You don’t want to do this.” You push against her and try to wriggle away, but she responds with a hissy breath against your neck.

She pulls back enough to look you in the eye, her jaws hanging open enough that you can see the glint of her fangs. You recoil from her touch as if she burned you, shove against her shoulders.

A low growl rumbles from her chest. Lightning fast she grabs and twists your arms behind your back, leveraging her weight against you and crushing the breath out of your lungs. You can’t help but bare your teeth in terror. You squirm, but you might as well be buried under a ton of lead. 

She opens her jaws and leans towards you like a shark, without thinking you jerk your head forward in a headbutt. Last ditch, pathetic, all you have are the muscles in your neck. The angle was wrong. A sharp flower of pain blooms in your forehead and circuits behind your eyes up to the root of your damaged horn—and she doesn’t even let go. 

By the time you’ve blinked your eyes open her breath is harsh, and she’s fisted her claws in your hair. Her fingers constrict around your horn.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she rasps.

“You’re going to kill me.” Your voice is tight, shaking. 

“Just—“ she wrenches your head to the side, exposing the length of your neck. “Relax, Kankri Vantas.”

“Don’t—“ you start to say, you hate the way your name sounds in that voice, her strength is anathema. Her cold tongue slithers down your jaw and throbs against your frantic pulse. She makes a noise that sounds like relief. The protest on your tongue distorts into a low whimper as she bites down.

You spasm and squirm, eyes widening in shock and the pain of her thick needle fangs buried and worrying at your flesh. She’s trying to drag something out of you and its nothing but teeth and pinching and oh god it fucking hurts and you know your mother never hurt anyone like this. 

She makes a frustrated sound against your neck and drags her teeth out of your skin. You gasp with something like relief, until she pushes her fingers roughly against your neck, as if she’s looking for something. Then you realize.

You open your mouth—what for even, as if she would stop if you asked—to say something, but instead it just gives this awful high groan an avenue of escape when she tears into you again. Something bursts. Trickles of your blood burn boiling lines down the side of your throat. You want to move, to fight but shock weighs you down like irons. Your muscles have turned to mud. 

Her mouth is cold and greedy. You shake and try to breathe but her fangs worry at your throat and tear the skin, rip at your arteries and now you’re sure you’re going to die. 

Your breath is coming in shuddery gasps, choked off by pain. Your vision—what vision, you can’t see past the sharp light of her skin is—you think its fading out because if nothing else you can still feel your eyes trying to roll back into your head as your head gets heavy.

“Stop,” you choke out. They’re not going to find you in time, and you won’t be the only one dead by the end of this. 

No, you’re not resigned to death here you—you’re not.

And yet with every messy gulp of your life she takes—is her skin getting brighter? Fuck are your eyes even open?—your strength falls away and the voice in your head that knows you’re fucked gets louder.

Louder than the heartbeat thundering in your skull.

“Kankri!”

Everything is underwater now. You don’t hear the same when you are underwater, sound is muffled, thick, distorted. Not like smell, and the only thing you can smell right now is your own blood. 

“KANKRI!”

No one has a voice like hers. There is thunder, and screech of a diamond blade against snapping stone as the roar of a familiar weapon cuts through the cotton in your aural canals. 

Oh fuck—

You gasp as your attacker rips out of you with a snarl. 

Her grip fails, and you fall like a stone.

Or you would have. Familiar arms catch you and even that impact blots out what’s left of your eyesight. You’re fighting for breath someone is touching you and you’re so tired touching but on your raw nerves you can tell this is Meulin by the texture of wide, rough pads of her fingers, the hardness of her arms—you are safe but—

“Don’t,” you’re half sobbing now. You try to speak with your hands, but you can barely twitch your fingers and you know she’s not looking at your mouth. 

“Shhhhh,” you hear hissing, sudden pressure on your neck by some fabric. 

You think her hands might be shaking. Your blood is howling, you force your hand up to touch her face.

The world falls in on you with the distant roar of a chainsaw, a guttural roar—

Something breaks. You sink into dark like a stone.

**

Your world has narrowed.

You are not a dreamer. Most trolls are not. But like most, you are well acquainted with daymares. Were you younger, and more fanciful perhaps, you would wonder for one thick heartbeat if the fresh hell you see before you now is in fact one of your dayterrors, one as familiar as the shuddering handles on your chainsaw. 

There is a pale attacker, holding the limp body of your beloved charge in her arms, his bright blood garishly smeared across her lips in a cruel parody of a grin. He bleeds, and its only because you can see the painful red of his eyes fighting for focus beneath heavy lids that you know he clings to life and consciousness even now. 

But you are not a dreamer, nor young. 

A roar, raw and thunderous rises from your chest, filling every crack of this enclave the same way that drop of ink darkens a cup of water—completely, irrevocably.

There is a sharp electric hum, the sound of razors. In a split second the enemy rainbow drinker is suffused by violet lighting—you blink and see her slammed against the far wall, falling with a snarl.

You see Meulin dive forward to catch Kankri out of the corner of your eye, but you are already flying.

You swing the blade down in a heavy arc and stop. Your arms jerk and your hear the screech of metal grinding on metal as orange sparks fly—she has grabbed Kankri’s fucking sickle. You bear down on her with an acid hiss, your arms shaking. Its like hitting the stone itself, unyielding, brittle and god damn her you will break it. This vile strength comes from his stolen blood.

Only half her face is visible strings of mattered hair hanging down into her mad eyes and bloodstained teeth bared—she pushes up with a snarl and you scream—

You jerk your blade back. She growls as her blade flies from her hands and she lunges to her feet. You bash the body of the chainsaw into her nose with a wet crunch. She staggers back with a low moan but as she whirls to come at you again, claws raised high—

You howl and slam your blade into the side of her neck. There is a brief screech and grind as you strike the bones in her neck that rattles your arms and shoulders—you follow the strike through and breathe—

There is a light thud on stone. The corpse collapses with a sigh, a puppet devoid of life. As you straighten you realize there is blood on your clothes, on your face—near the corner of your mouth.

It is still warm with your charge’s life.

For a moment your tongue twists against the inside of your cheek. Your guts roil, void and sluggish. You swipe it away with the back of your hand.

The glow of the dead woman’s skin flutters once, and fades. This creature is broken, bleeding and in pieces, and the blood from the corpse seeps out to stain the heavy hem of your skirt.

There is a strange numbing feeling crawling its way through your pusher. It is some cladekin to shame.

Your throat tightens. Already you know exactly the shape of Kankri’s eyes, the light set of his jaw, the twitch of his claws when he wakes and realizes what happens. He will not be surprised. He will not be angry. But he will grieve.

When you chose him—so long ago and yet even looking at him now you remember the way that grub wriggled in your arms, the curve of his thimble horns, the high silk feather of his squeaks and suddenly you ache—you learned that what you have for him is like a cut mineral. Multifaceted, forged in fire. Something that to fully see even once needs to be held, picked up, and examined from many sides.

But it can also, sometimes, like now be hard. Hard, cold and sharp.

You were his first follower. But you have always, always been something else first. 

You bend down and scrape Kankri’s sickle, slimy with gore, off the ground. 

 

**

You are rising the black depths of a dreamless sleep, and with the dull sting at your throat pulling you to the surface of consciousness you remember everything. As your vision swims into focus, your eyes are soothed by the mild dark of night.

Meulin leans over you, the dark flyaways of her hair suffused with the thin rose moonlight seeping in through the open window. Her eyes catch and keep the light, but they are level, cool. 

Your heart sinks and immediately you move to sit up, and reach out. She hisses lightly and pushes you down. She pushes a waterskin up to your cracked lips. You almost choke in a sudden desperation—the water is leathery and warm but it’s never tasted sweeter. You are dry and cold as the husk of a slitherbeast. You cough and pull away to breathe, struggle to sit up—but she keeps you down with a light pressure to your shoulder. Her signs are sharp and small.

_You should not move. I’m going to get Rosa now._

_Wait,_ Your fingers are stupid and slow, but she doesn’t turn away from you yet. More than anything you want to touch her and you see the set of her jaw and the hurt in her expression. You should not push but you’re apparently not done making mistakes today. 

_I’m sorry,_ you sign, and you mean it.

Someone died today because you were a fucking idiot. You scared the shit out of your clade because you couldn’t take the time to just fucking ask one of them to get up and come with you. You stupidly followed a fucking blood trail into a dark room and everything that followed is your own fucking fault.

You irresponsible, stupid, shitting wriggler. 

Normally you are good with words. Right now you are bloodless and clumsy, and you can already feel the sweat at the small of your back. 

_I’m sorry,_ you sign again. Just—

 _Do you know,_ she signs furiously, her eyes hard, _how I feel when I have to wash your blood off my hands? Do you understand how much it hurts for me to see that you don’t value your life enough to be more careful than this?_

Her eyes shine and there’s nothing for you to do. She needs to be angry with you—so you let her. You want to say that is because of them that you fear death, because its true. But your words have been powerless all day, and you don’t have the recourse to contradict her now, not in this moment.

 _Rest,_ she commands again. _I’m going—_ her hands stumble, just for a second— _to get Rosa. Don't move._

She flees. 

You lie there with a dull ache settling over your pusher.

You sit up anyway when your custodian enters the room. She smells like water, scrubbed skin, with the tinge of—

“It’s Mituna’s,” she says as she kneels beside you.

“I’m an idiot,” you croak. Your vocal nodes are made of rust. “I fucked up.” 

She waits. She is giving you space to spill, and vent, but you can’t spill anymore and you have nothing more to say.

After a moment, she pulls you close.

You cling to her, as though for your life.

Why, you want to ask. But you already know the answer. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well that's that. I decided to collapse the remainder of this into one big fat chapter because of the time it took to get the rest of this up here. The third illustration here was beautifully done a fourth partner in crime, [Nightram](http://nightram.tumblr.com/), also known as [askthepsiioniic.](http://askthepsiioniic.tumblr.com/) We all hope you enjoyed this, it was certainly a whirlwind to work on. Ciao and thanks for reading! :)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a work in continuity with the Signless askblog I run, [asktheironinfidel](http://asktheironinfidel.tumblr.com/), and was a collaboration that could have only come together as a result of extensive pestering of extremely talented people in addition to their endless patience, goodwill and inspiration--[askthedevoteddisciple (](http://askthedevoteddisciple.tumblr.com/)[miss-ari](http://miss-ari.tumblr.com/)), [askhisdisciple](http://askhisdisciple.tumblr.com/) ([silicon-pickpocket](http://silicon-pickpocket.tumblr.com/)) and last but not least, the illustrator of this story, [ask-the-dolorosa](http://ask-the-dolorosa.tumblr.com/) ([fernacular](http://fernacular.tumblr.com/)) Thank you for all your support and I hope you enjoy. At the conclusion of this fic, I will post the questions that inspired this! The whole thing is complete, but I will be posting it in 2 chunks.
> 
> Edit: The questions that prompted this fic: 
> 
> Anonymous asked asktheironinfidel: Have you met any rainbow drinkers besides your custodian?
> 
> Anonymous asked asktheironinfidel: Any scary close shaves with vagabonds out in the wilds you wander?
> 
> Anonymous asked asktheironinfidel: Has your family ever killed for you? How did you feel?


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